Emergency Information Systems Interop Workshop for better preparedness @ ISCRAM 2011

I would like to announce that we are organizing an emergency/disaster information systems interop workshop for the next ISCRAM 2011. The interop workshop will be an environment where software vendors and information systems solution providers can bring in their systems for testing against popular information exchange standards such as PFIF, CAP, GeoRSS, EDXL Standards, GIS Standards, etc. The structure will be based on the Apache interop workshops. More importantly we will want to test, improve and validate information exchange between systems for certain popular pre-defined use-cases utilizing these standards. Thereby the results of this workshop will serve better preparedness by assuring that the systems that participate are able to exchange data effectively and work more efficiently in partnership at the time of disaster response.

The interop workshop will be part of the information systems interop standards track, where you can also submit research papers, work in progress papers, practitioner presentations covering best practices and demos for inclusion in ISCRAM. We are also welcoming presentations on new, existing and emerging interop standards for educational purposes to help improve awareness, facilitate feedback and adoption.

Participants interested in participating for the interop workshop can submit their solutions/products/demos/

functional prototypes as a demo for this track.

Further submission details can be found at:
  http://iscram2011.lnec.pt/pdf/tracks/information_systems_interop_standards.pdf

For information of the ISCRAM 2011 conference the main website is:
  http://iscram2011.lnec.pt/

We look forward to your participation to this much needed exercise. If you have any suggestion on this track please do not hesitate to contact myself, Renato Iannella or Tom de Groeve. We also want to form a steering committee for the interop workshop, so do let us know if you would like to join that.

UN APCICT/ESCAP Publication on ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction includes Sahana

The recent UN APCICT/ESCAP Case Studies on ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction includes the Sahana project focusing on the experiences deploying Sahana for the Haiti Response. It includes a lot of other case studies and best practices in different countries in the Asia Pacific Region and is a worthwhile read. You can find the publication on the UNAPCICT website at http://www.unapcict.org/ecohub/ict-for-disaster-risk-reduction-1. I co-authored this case study with Mark Prutsalis. Thank you to APDIP for continuing to recognize Sahana contributions in this sector.

What makes a truly Open Standard?

As far as I am concerned, for a standard to be truly open it should have the following going for it in order of priority.

1. A liberally licensed specification - Not all standards are free and some require royalties to obtain. Licenses should be aligned to the Free and Open Source principles.
2. An Open Community Process - Not all standards are defined and refined in an open community process. Some require expensive exclusive memberships before you can participate, which limits the participation by organizations / individuals in poorer developing nations.
3. An Open Source implementation - This is not a must, but it certainly helps assure that the standard has been implemented transparently. It also help propagate the standard as any one can adopt these libraries into their products. TCP/IP, is a good example of the success of a standard through this model.

However we need to work with the reality of the proprietary nature of most standards and give priority to the ones that have greater adoption or we would not be serving the critical need for having a standard in the first place.